


Night Winds Across Her Face

by Nadia_Hernandez



Category: Charmed (TV 2018)
Genre: Blood, Demonic Possession, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Fear, Monsters, Night Terrors, Nightmare Fuel, Nightmares, Phobias, Possession, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-01-14 18:50:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18482254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nadia_Hernandez/pseuds/Nadia_Hernandez
Summary: Macy has been having terrible dreams again. She's lucky to have the kind of sisters--and friends--who will always have her back.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This season has been a heck of a ride and I am glad to have been a part of it with you guys. Here's to, like, fifty-seven more! :)

When the dreams return they are awful. She is not Macy, in these dreams. She is no longer a tall, dorky geneticist with unruly curls and an abiding love for terrible TV shows from the late nineties. She can place no exact finger on what she becomes in these nightmares but it is a twisted thing of purest evil. She is hunched and runs alternately on all fours or with long, sharp nails furrowing the dirt. Eyes that she knows are red--she does not know how she knows this but they are--burn above slitted nostrils and a mouth with what feels like far, far too many teeth.

She does violence in these dreams to those who least deserve it, those who have done her kindness throughout the day. If a woman holds the door open with a smile at work Macy will dream of slaking the horrific thirst she feels with mouthful after mouthful of hot blood from that woman’s torn throat. If a waiter with smooth cheeks and long, fine fingers makes sure to sprinkle a little extra parmesan over her linguine zoodles, just the way she likes them best, the hateful little beast that she becomes will stand giggling over his dismembered body. This is truly horrible, far worse than Medusa. The Gorgon had struck down in general those who deserved it--real assholes for the most part--in her quest for vengeance. Macy tortures and butchers the innocent for fun.

The dreams are foul and she cannot escape them. Her eyes feel swollen because for more than a week what sleep she has suffered has been without rest. She checks the Hilltown newsfeed on her phone, each morning, to make sure that some poor soul has not been torn to shreds in truth by that bestial quality residing within her. They have not but a rash of mutilated small animals, two cats and multiple squirrels, have been found around campus. The student body suspects Satanists, or possibly Rudy Giuliani come to feed.

With a rising gorge Macy tells herself that she could not have done this. When she awakens with a coppery tang in her throat she rushes to the bathroom to brush, rinse, gargle, floss, spit and do everything but scrub it out with a wire brush. The woman looking back from the mirror is haggard with purple smeared under her eyes and cheeks hollower than they were two weeks ago. She tries to offer the mirror woman a lopsided grin but it is stillborn. She says, instead, “Hell of a morning for a morning, isn’t it?”

She passes the day in a haze, broken but unbowed. That night, though… that night’s dream grows into a feverish, sweltering summer storm of visceral discontent. It’s not a stranger she stands over, this time, ripping hunks of meat from and she’s not an outwardly misshapen thing in this dream. She is Macy, still, or wears Macy’s face, at least. There is nothing in her eyes but hell staring blankly out onto the world. 

The Demon-Macy that she fears has Maggie bound before her and, with a wickedly sharp short blade, flenses flesh away. She peels skin, fascia and fat in long strips to reveal the red, raw muscle underneath and her sister’s agony is so complete that she cannot even scream so Macy does it for her when she awakens. No one hears and so she sneaks to the bathroom for a long shower to boil her sins away but it does little but plaster her curls against her skin and steam up the bathroom mirror. She takes two Sudafed (take two and call me in the morning!) so that she will not sleep again and so will not have to face the horror that is Maggie looking out from a flayed face on her and living yet.

Morning breaks and all three sisters are alive and two of them are well. Macy refuses her usual sausage butty because meat has begun to turn her stomach and, when Maggie bops down the stairs to alight in front of her granola, mango and non-fat vegan yofu, it is all she can do to keep from throwing up her cream and coffee.

“Hey, guys!” Maggie says. “Morning.” She yawns and scratches the messy ponytail that she usually sleeps in. It’s a weekend morning and there is little to do but lounge around the house in pajamas. “Dude, I had the craziest dream.”

Mel doesn’t even look up from her paper and sausage roll. “Your dreams are always crazy--ever since you were a little kid.” 

“Yeah, but this one was crazier than usual,” she says. 

“What happened?” Macy asks, intrigued and frightened.

“Well, first I married Parker in it--which is like sorta a weird subconscious little girl fantasy but it’s kinda nice anyway. And then Parker turned into Sebastian Stan--he is totes a hottie and does NOT look like a potato, no matter what Twitter says--and we rowed across the Atlantic Ocean in a little barrel while that freaky sorority ghost we busted a few months ago chased us wearing a pirate hat.” She shrugs. “That’s when it gets a little weird, I guess.”

Mel raises an eyebrow and folds down her paper. She looks so like the Marisol that Macy has seen in pictures that it makes her heart ache. “That’s when it gets weird, bebita?”

“Yeah,” Maggie says. “I mean, I guess it was weird before but… bad weird. I was in a dark little room with Macy but she, like… wasn’t Macy. Her eyes were funny. And she was hurting me.” She shivers, hugs herself close and seems like a babydoll in truth. “I don’t remember much after that. I guess it must have been been right before I woke up.”

This is more than Macy can bear. She claps a hand over her mouth to avoid losing her coffee, sprints to the bathroom and does lose it there in a sour rush that stains the toilet water a dark, reddish brown. It’s only a few more staggering steps to the bedroom and a locked door. She makes it and collapses, sobbing, on sheets that are still damp from her nocturnal sweat.


	2. Chapter 2

She is still curled in the fetal position when a soft hand knocks at the door. “Macy?” It’s Harry. “Your sisters are worried. I am worried.”

“Wouldn’t want you to feel left out,” she mumbles around a mouthful of tears that feels like rotten meat. “I’m worried as hell, Harry. Just go away and let me sort this out, okay?”

“I don’t mean to intrude but are you really sure that is the wisest course of action?” he asks. 

“I’m not super up on wise right now but yeah, that feels right.” Despair beckons flirtatiously from a tantalizing distance. “I appreciate it and all but there’s not really anything you can do. Not really anything that anyone can do unless you know another demon who hasn’t gone, you know, people-eaty and feels like telling me how she managed it.”

“I may not be a demon but I have been around magic and magical creatures for some time. I have some experience with them and how to cope with their problems.”

“No offense, Harry, and I know what you said before and all but… we usually cope with those problems by vanquishing someone.”

“I could never hurt you,” he says.

She turns plaintive eyes on the door. “What if I deserved it? What if I begged you to destroy me before I hurt someone else?”

“I could never hurt you,” he says, again. She cannot tell if it is reassurance or prayer. “Let me in so we can figure this out--together.”

She relents with a sigh and he materializes beside her bed. She offers him a wry smile. “You’re not getting me at my best, sorry. I figured if I’m turning into a hell-beast that I might as well look the part, right?”

“It’s not so bad,” he says, unconvincingly. “Just a bit… rumpled, is all. If a hell-beast then a rumpled one, wot?”

 

“Pip-pip, cheerio.” She presses long, graceful fingers into her eyes. “How are Mel and Maggie? I must’ve freaked them all the way out over breakfast.”

“They are worried,” he admits, “but I implored them to give you your space. They both protested, Maggie in quite good voice I might add, but relented and retired to their respective sororities for the day.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Did you just actually refer to the Sarkana as a sorority?”

“Perhaps,” he says.

“Dude, Mel would seriously cut you if she heard that.” Her smile cannot help but widen. She is certain that she looks insane.

“She would but they are a sisterhood of witches so I am technically right,” he says, “and that is the best way to be right, after all. I learned that on Reddit.”

“Oh my god, giving you that iPad for Christmas was the worst mistake I ever made,” Macy says. “How long before you’re on 4chan or Encylopedia Dramatica?” She shudders, a child raised by the Wild West of the mid 2000s Internet on geek message boards who first found love on IRC chat.

He raises a hand. “Once,” he says, “and never again. I still have not washed my mind clean of what I saw, there.” He sighs. “I fear that I shall be a Grey-lighter for some time to come… but enough of my problems… tell me yours.”

Talking to him makes her feel so good, so safe and so normal that for an instant she has forgotten that she has any. This illusion evaporates with a cloud over the sun and she tells him the whole story. She means to share in broad strokes, to spare him and preserve some shred of dignity, but ends in painting the entire vivid, gruesome picture.

“So,” she says, “there it is. That’s why if I ask you to kill me one day, maybe even one day soon, you can’t even hesitate an instant. Do what has to be done so Mel doesn’t have to. I know it’ll be hard on you but it’d be harder on her, right?” It is disturbing how quickly this has become her fate, how readily she has accepted it.

“You’re not listening,” he says. “I cannot hurt you. The Charmed Ones are--you are--a treasure beyond price. I could not live with myself if you came to harm by my hands.”

“And I couldn’t live with myself if Maggie or Mel came to harm by mine.” She scrunches her face up to hold back more tears--all she needs. “It’s the damn dreams, Harry. They’re driving me insane. I don’t know what’s up or down, wrong or right… and for Maggie to have the same dream. It’s just freaking me the hell out.”

“Maggie is an empath,” he says. “That would explain her dream--or rather your dream bleeding across into her subconscious. As for you…” He pauses for a long moment and pinches the bridge of his nose with long fingers. “If these dreams are not just a manifestation of anxiety about the demon blood coursing through your veins, and I am not fully prepared to accept that they are not, then could it be that some outside force, one with a vested interest in frightening and fragmenting the Charmed Ones, intruding? If you dreams are touching another, after all…”

She finishes the thought for him. “Then they can be coming from another in the first place.” She wipes her eyes. “There’s only one way we can know for sure--or even begin to find out.” She sniffles away the last drop of the anguish that has wracked her. “It’s time to dig into some research… and if there’s one thing on this good earth that Macy Vaughn kicks ass at it’s homework!”

They pause just long enough for her to freshen up before diving into the Book of Shadows, Lemegeton and Book of Simon the Magician. They consult other volumes, too, lesser known but still potent. The Black Pullet is among them and also the Testament of Hermes Trismegistus and Doctor Johann Georg Faustus’ Disquisition Upon the Arts Sacred and Profane. Enochian writings by John Dee and Gioncarlo Bruno are considered with as much gravity as the infernal poetry of Alistair Crowley and Kenneth Anger. 

The mad, prophetic scrawlings of Jack Parsons play a part, too, and before long Macy’s head swims with occult symbols and eldritch chicken scratch of every species. Her Latin is strong and her Greek is not terrible but when the writing wanders into Hebrew, Arabic or Chaldean she is lost and must rely on Harry’s translation. Once in a while both are defeated utterly by a dead end or language known only to madness, as in the later works of Alhazred, and must painstakingly recreate through the imagination what came about as the result of drugs or torture by that which dwells behind the stars.

A name, finally, surfaces and Macy skims it off the top like scum from a pool. “Aeceditius,” she says. “Demon of despair.”

“Now we know,” Harry says. “He is powerful and subtle.”

“Maybe, but he’s also messed with the wrong chick.” Macy runs a hand through her dark curls and smiles. In the reflection cast by the silver candlesticks by which they have done their research it is a deeply unpleasant smile. All her fear has dissolved into fury. “Let’s figure out how to vanquish the son of a bitch.”


	3. Chapter 3

Preparations proceed swiftly and precise. He is a scholar and a gentleman, she a woman of science. Perfectionism comes as naturally to both of them as breathing and in a summoning of this magnitude its importance is impossible to overstate. Aeceditius is dangerous and the sheer force of his personality alone, according to both Faustus writing in 1534 and Lord Blackward Goyle in 1761, is enough to bear a mortal to the earth. It is good then, Macy reflects, that they are a Whitelighter and a witch. No, she amends, she is not a mere witch… she is a Charmed One.

Mel and Maggie join her and Harry attends her but she knows, at the end of all things, she must face Aceditius alone to defeat him. He is her inner demon, after all, and these can be exorcised but by prayer and fasting. She meditates on this while mixing the last ingredients in the brazier before lighting it: bloodied meat to entice, dark rum to intoxicate, white sage to weaken and a hint of bitter almond to bind. 

Maggie, to her left, is finishing the pentacle in a shade of Kat von D called Crucifix. “You know I love you,” she says to Macy, “because I paid like fifty freaking dollars at Sephora for a tube of this.”

Macy cannot help but smile. “Then why did you use it instead of red paint or a magic marker or something?”

She shrugs. “This is important. I figured it would be more meaningful if I made, like, a sacrifice and writing in this lipstick is basically writing in blood.” Her expression hardens. “Besides… his demon made you dream about peeling my freaking face off and that is not cool.” Macy, believing that to go into this with unspoken burdens on her heart would prove disastrous, had revealed all. “I like my face. It’s a good face.”

“It’s a great face,” Mel says. She has finished spreading a circle of protective salt mixed with the ashes of a snow white rook’s bones. “Are we ready?”

“We are,” Macy says. She laces her fingers through Maggie’s, and then through Mel’s. Harry stands behind them, watching carefully but not a part of their circle. He is strong, brave and good but he is not a Charmed One. Together they begin their chant:

We call to thee across the Void,  
Call to thy brooding place of sorrow.  
Come to us, Aecetius,  
Cast off thyself thy funeral shroud.  
Hasten to us, before the morrow,  
Lest be thy infamy destroyed.  
For thou must work thy designs insidious  
If thou art in truth a demon proud.

The flickering of their spell candles grows dim, gutters to a greater life and then dies altogether. The smell of the meat and sage, lanced through by bitterness but not enough to kill, hangs more cloying in the air than it should per volume in the brazier. Macy feels sweat on Mel’s palm and Maggie’s fingers tighten around hers. The room is alive with energy and it courses across her skin, from the roots of her toes to the tips of her hair. It aches in her belly, almost nausea, and rests like tongues of fire in her pores.

Suddenly he is there, in the pentacle, a misshapen hulking figure wrapped with grey gauze and about his face a midnight caul. His voice presses on Macy’s mind and it is all she can do to bear up under the inutterable, weighty grief of it. “Little mouse… why dost thou summon me?”

It takes a long moment to gather enough courage to answer. “I summon you because you have conspired to drive me mad, Aecetius, to cause me to harm my sister and to sever the bond between Charmed Ones. You are hereby charged with these crimes against our coven and against all witch-kind.”

“I have but held a mirror up to thee, little mouse… I hath shown thee thy fears and they griefs, ones that dwell beneath the surface of thy toilsome mind.” He chuckles, a sound that burbles beneath the springs of Macy’s consciousness and threatens to straighten them. “And thy curly pate is toilsome indeed.”

“You are a carnival mirror, a false mirror, one that shows only wickedness and nothing good. I name you a liar, Aecetius.”

“I am what I am,” he says. “What can I be but a son of he who fathered all lies?”

“Do I take this to mean that you will not repent and return to your place of origin? Or to the nearest convenient dimension?” Macy cannot help the quote… she draws strength from it. And if the ramblings of ancient madmen can be prophetic, holy scripture then why the hell not Ghostbusters?

“I cannot repent my nature, mouse, nor will you when you feast on the steaming guts of the one who cowers behind you.”

“I’m gonna take that as a no,” Macy says, and nods to her sister. “Mel, get your spell ready.”

“Okay,” she says. “I was kinda hoping he’d be like this about it--I worked hard on that spell and it’d be a shame for it to go to waste, really.”

They begin their charm:

Away from us, oh demon fly,  
Thy power over us denied,  
Thy influence broken on the tree,  
Our sisterhood shall set us free.

Aecetius tries to fight it and, for a second or two, Macy actually believes that he will break his binding and savage them. The bitter almond holds firm, though, and their sisterhood proves potent. He fades with a long, shuddering moan and before long only its ghost remains to hover on the smoke filled air.

The sisters and Harry collapse into a hug with Macy in the center. “Whew,” Maggie says. “If I’d known it was gonna be that easy I wouldn’t have canceled my date tonight. We handled that like pow!”

“Macy handled that like pow,” Mel says. “I wrote the spell and you drew the sigils but she stood up to that demon.” 

Macy can feel Mel’s arm around her waist, Maggie nuzzling her neck. She can feel Harry’s cheek warm against hers, his fingers stroke her hair. She is tired, so tired that she is not sure she won’t sleep a long and hopefully dreamless week but she is content. These people are family, they are home, and no demon--whether outside or within her--can tear that asunder.


End file.
